The rapid acceptance of the Internet has changed the way in which people communicate. A significant number of letters and telephone calls have been replaced with email messages. Although email is an effective communication medium, ongoing on-line communications are often hampered because of the extra steps necessary to view, reply, and send email messages. Further, email provides no way of knowing if the person with whom someone is communicating is on-line at that particular moment. With these deficiencies, instant messaging (IM) has gained great popularity over email to facilitate ongoing on-line communications.
Typically, IM allows users to form a list of people with whom they wish to communicate. This list is typically called a “buddy list,” and most IM services allow users to communicate with anyone on their buddy list, assuming that the person is on-line at that given time. Generally, users will send an alert to those persons on their buddy list who are on-line prior to engaging in a conversation. Most IM services provide a small text window where two or more users can type messages that both users can instantly view. IM services not only allow users to send notes back and forth while on-line, they can also allow users to set up chat rooms to communicate with groups of users, and to share links to web sites as well as images, audio, and the like.
With the increasing popularity of IM, as well as email, users continue to develop shortcuts for conveying words, phrases, and emotions to make these text-based communications more efficient and fluent. These shortcuts may include the use of acronyms, abbreviations, symbols, or combinations thereof. Given the difficulty in communicating emotion with written communications, a growing set of accepted symbols for emotions often punctuates these text-based messages. For example, a :) or :(can easily convey whether a sender of a message is happy or sad, respectively.
Given the wide acceptance of IM, there is a need to support IM between traditional on-line users and traditional land-based or wireless telephony users, who are restricted to using voice to send messages and to receiving audible messages. Further, there is a need to maintain the integrity of IM by conveying emotion and like characters with the messages between the on-line and telephony users.